I cannot remember the exact moment I first saw professional wrestling. What I remember is my grandfather.
His name was JL Crush. When I stayed with him during the summers, we would go to Blockbuster and rent a wrestling VHS. We would watch it over and over again for that week, return it, and rent another. That was how I got educated on wrestling — not in a classroom, but on a couch, rewinding the same tape until we knew every spot by heart.
Those shelves were mostly WWE at first. Once I ran out of those, I moved on to WCW and got to see something new. I was never really a WCW person, though. I was firmly a WWE fan first. WCW felt foreign and bizarre to me — a different language spoken by people I did not quite know yet. As an adult, it is backwards. I love WCW more now.
The first real memory I have of wrestling on television — as opposed to a tape we rented — is, I believe, Sunday Night Heat in the 1998 or 1999 timeframe. But I really remember falling in love with wrestling in the 2000s, during the McMahon-Helmsley era. Triple H was my favorite. He was the franchise player, the best at his craft. And he knew it. And he would let people know it.
I was always a fan of the heels growing up. I remember feeling bad for them. I could relate to the heels. I could relate to people not liking you for seemingly unfair reasons. And I saw Triple H — someone who was really good at his craft, who was The Game — and people hated him for it. I loved him for having the courage to be himself even when people hated it.
Growing up, I realized the heels were not always on the up and up. Triple H would cheat a lot to win. But he always had a good explanation for it. The odds were stacked against him, so he had to cheat to even them up. That logic made sense to me as a kid. I did not need a lecture on kayfabe. I needed a heel who could justify what he was doing.
The Map Gets Bigger
Around 2004, I started to explore wrestling outside of WWE. I found TNA. It felt like I had just opened a whole new world.
I had caught some of the later WCW on live TV. I started watching in 2000, and up until the end of 2001, I would watch the first hour of Nitro before Raw came on the hour at 9. I loved Scott Steiner. I was confused by a lot else. The same foreign-and-bizarre feeling I had gotten from the Blockbuster tapes was now happening on Monday nights.
TNA was different, but in a good way. It had the X-Division, which took me back to the cruiserweight division of WCW — the part of WCW that had actually landed with me. There was also a lot of younger talent I did not know: AJ Styles, Christopher Daniels, Abyss, Team Canada, America’s Most Wanted, The Naturals. Then they also had Jeff Jarrett, who I remembered from WCW and WWE back in the day. And the big draw for me was Raven and Jeff Hardy — and also Ron Killings, Konnan, and BG James at that time. I fell in love.
TNA was my first real introduction to professional wrestling, even if it was just dipping a toe. TNA in 2005 and 2006 is widely considered the golden years of TNA wrestling, and that holds true for me. During that point, TNA was a true alternative to WWE in the sense that it was not doing straight-up sports entertainment. It was doing professional wrestling, and doing it quite well, in my opinion.
I started to fall out of love with wrestling — and TNA especially — in the later 2000s. 2009 was especially a rough year. TNA had turned into WWE-lite. I enjoyed ROH, but it was harder in those days to keep up. I was a full-time student without a job and without a means to order the DVDs. I had to rely on message boards and free recaps. Kid me had lived on whatever was on TV or in the Blockbuster bin. Now there was more wrestling in the world than I could reach.
The Pipe Bomb and the Walkout
CM Punk got me back into wrestling with his pipe bomb promo. The Summer of Punk got me back into WWE. I still remember how fired up I was for the Money in the Bank 2011 pay-per-view. It was a masterclass in how to build interest in wrestling: take something true, tell the truth for as long as you can, and then add in some drama to turn up the volume. There was real animosity and frustration. It was real. The fans could sense it. And it created this environment where we legitimately did not know where this was going. I was hooked. To me, this is pro wrestling.
I fell out of wrestling again around the time of CM Punk walking out. I did enjoy the Daniel Bryan miracle of WrestleMania 30, but that was the beginning of the decline. I was briefly brought back by CM Punk returning to AEW. But that quickly faded.
For a long stretch after that, I followed wrestling casually — reading updates online, hardly ever watching. The flame was not out, exactly. It was just not burning.
Coming Back
My grandfather passed away this year. I had not really thought much about wrestling in the meantime. But his passing ignited that flame again.
I have been diving head first into old-school southern wrestling, territory wrestling. And I love it. The WCW that felt bizarre to me as a kid is part of what I love now, along with the territories — Smoky Mountain, Mid-South, USWA. I grew up on sports entertainment. Today I am a fan of professional wrestling. I wrote about that contrast in The Lost Art of Professional Wrestling — this essay is the origin story behind it.
And kid me would be in paradise right now. It used to be difficult to follow wrestling outside of what was on TV. Now you can stream just about everything. A lot of independent wrestling is streamed worldwide on YouTube for free. I am excited about that in a way I cannot fully explain to the version of me who had to choose between message board recaps and nothing. The best days of professional wrestling could be ahead. It is a good time to be a wrestling fan.
I am back, and I have eyes on the current state of the business again — what I like, what I do not like, what I think is working and what is not, as a newly returning fan. That is a story for another day.
In His Name
When my grandfather passed, I donated $100 in his name to the Cauliflower Alley Club — professional wrestling’s volunteer-run 501(c)(3), founded by Mike Mazurki in the 1960s. The CAC’s benevolent fund helps people who made a living in the wrestling industry when they hit hard times: medical bills, funeral costs, living expenses, disaster-related home repairs. It felt like the right way to honor a man who taught me to love this business on a couch with a stack of rented tapes.
If you want to give, you can donate to the CAC here. Every amount helps. No guilt — just an invitation, from one wrestling fan to another.